New Left

The New Left was a broad political movement in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of leftist educators, agitators, and others in the Western world who sought to implement reforms on issues such as civil rights, gay rights, abortion, gender roles, and drugs. The New Left originated in Europe in response to the Communist Party of Great Britain and the French Communist Party's confused responses to the quelling of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Many Marxists in both parties began to rethink their ideologies, and the anti-Stalinist left coalesced around the "New Left" as the counterculture and anti-war movements took off during the 1960s. In the United States, the New Left was represented by movements such as the hippies, the Yippies, the Black Panther Party, the gay rights movement, the National Organization for Women, and anti-war college campus protesters. The hippies listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as LSD, marijuana, and shrooms, and many people experimented with Eastern religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, etc.) and alternative medicines. The New Left rejected the establishment's way of life, preferring to wear long hair, tye-dye shirts, and bell-bottoms instead of clean-cut hair and business suits. 1968 was the climactic year for the New Left, seeing the May 68 unrest in France, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in the United States, and the occupation of the Student Union Building in Stockholm, Sweden. The movement died down after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, with many of the New Left's causes being fulfilled; Harvey Milk became the first openly gay US politician, Richard Nixon forced Boston schools to bus African-American and white students to school together, the war in Vietnam had come to an end, and women were granted abortion rights. However, the anti-establishment culture would survive in the form of punk rock, goths, rockers, metalheads, and other youth subcultures. The New Left's legacy in politics can be seen in the Progressive Democrats, who succeeded George McGovern's New Left Democrats.